Better Together

Things we do together, get done better. When we face hardship together, we do better. When we share happiness together, we're happier. This is just a basic fact about our species, and it kills me that I feel the need to explain why that is.

_{source: YouTube}

I've lived on this planet for more than a half century. That means I spent a large part of my youth in the pre-internet era. No mobile phones, no zoom or teams meetings, no twitter; when we wanted to meet our friends and family we had to go out and meet them in the flesh. Time spent with them was special quality time because we didn't carry a screen in our pockets allowing remote contact whenever and wherever. We didn't only have to agree on a time, but a physical space to meet up. Our conversations were real, allowing for the full spectrum of not only speech, but facial expressions and body-language. Our daily lives were a perpetual training-ground for actual social interaction with other people. Meeting and talking to girls was an everyday practice, but my male peers from today have retreated behind digital screens, have become socially awkward and some even fall in the special category of "incels"...

In fact, the practice of dating has become an industry. An online industry. Just like everything else, human emotions have been captured by the insatiable growth economy. And this growth economy functions better when we function worse. Under an ideology of competition we compete at all scales, right down to the individual. We're raised with the idea that it's me against the world. Everyone else is a potential competitor in the market of everything and everyone. The capitalist economy works best when every individual acts like a business. Me Inc. You LLC. The atomization of society has reached peak efficiency, and with it we've lost touch with each other and we've lost trust in each other. We've lost sight of our single most defining trait, our most important characteristic, our most basic truth; we're better together.

We've traded economic "success" with social ineptitude, a loss of social coherence. "You do yours and I do mine" has replaced "many hands make light work". "Look out for number one" has replaced "strength in numbers". "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is the laughable replacement for mutual aid. If you don't believe me, which wouldn't surprise me in this age of hyper-individualism, trust the numbers. In the below linked video there's a discussion of a study that compares America's healthcare system with ten other rich countries, all of which have some form of universal healthcare. The basic comparison is this: you pay for your own healthcare (America), versus we all pay, through taxation, preferably progressive, for all our healthcare (the rest of the civilized world). The usual argument against universal healthcare boils down to "I don't want to pay for someone else's bad health".

The outcome is in complete accordance with what I've just said: if we pay together for all of us, we pay less and have better outcomes. Besides that mathematical proof of the superiority of togetherness, there's the added benefit that being part of a society like that makes us feel that we're actually part of a society, instead of just an individual island in a sea of eternal competition. It shows we give a damn about each other. It shows that even in sickness we get better better together... If you're against that, if you think there's a single rational or economical reason against the idea of universal healthcare, you're truly lost.

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